The Ku Klux Klan really is different

 I need to point this out? This survey purports to show that Democrats are not a whole lot more tolerant than Trump supporters regarding the political rights of groups they dislike. Except, well, the measure really showed that Rubio supporters were as willing to deprive Ku Klux Klan members of political rights as Trump supporters were of “Islamic fundamentalists.” Meanwhile the Democrats, Cruz people, and Kasichistas were even more tolerant of Ku Klux Klan members than the Rubio people. 

Got that? Everybody but Trump supporters picked the terrorist organization called the KKK as their most disliked group and supported depriving members of said terrorist organization of at least some political rights.

Meanwhile, Trump supporters wanted to deprive Islamic fundamentalists of some political rights, which would be terrible, except I suspect that many of them read “fundamentalist” as “terrorist.” The survey did not ask about Muslims, it asked about the far more loaded term “Islamic fundamentalist.” Which therefore makes the results suspect, because the term is so easy to misread and what normal citizen of any country would be against banning violent organizations bent on killing civilians?

In short, maybe it is true that Trumpists have no monopoly on intolerance. But unless I completely misunderstood footnote #1, all this survey measures is intolerance towards an American terrorist organization for non-Trump supporters, which it then compares to how much Trump supporters dislike non-American terrorists. Why that information is interesting is a bit beyond me. 

Comments

[Matt McIrvin]

Groups resembling the Klan are actually illegal, or operate under heavy restrictions on their freedom of expression, in many countries that we generally consider admirably free and democratic. The United States hasn't gone down that road, nor, probably, should it, but it doesn't necessarily signal that a country is some tyrannical dystopia.

This just seems like a variant of the standard right-wing tu quoque about how liberals aren't so tolerant because they're intolerant of intolerance.

(Or, on the other side of the coin, the claim that tolerance is logically incoherent because if taken to an extreme it tears itself apart by accepting its opposite. People who come up with this always seem to regard it as a novel and brilliant refutation; in practice, it's pretty clear to any intelligent person who endeavors to be unbigoted that they have to grapple with where to draw lines, particularly when it comes to intersectionality questions about oppressed group X oppressing oppressed group Y.)